SODP Dispatch - 16 July 2026

An AI lab says chatbots have what may be a key feature of consciousness. Are they right? And what now?

By Tim Bayne

When you interact with a large language model (LLM) – one of the systems behind chatbots such as ChatGPT and Claude – it can feel as though you are in contact with another conscious mind. But are you, really?

Some prominent scientists, such as Geoff Hinton and Richard Dawkins, claim you are. But most experts remain sceptical, arguing that the impressive cognitive capacities of LLMs occur in the absence of consciousness.

Last week researchers at Anthropic, the company behind Claude, waded into this debate with an interesting finding. They claim Claude has a normally invisible set of representations of information which guide its internal reasoning and its verbal output.

This is where it gets interesting. The researchers argue this finding can be understood in terms of an influential theory of consciousness called the global workspace theory.

What is the global workspace theory?

First proposed by the psychologist Bernard Baars in 1998 and further developed by the neuroscientist Stanislas Dehaene and his collaborators, this theory holds that consciousness involves the activity of a “global workspace”. This is a kind of processing hub in the mind or brain that integrates and broadcasts information, allowing it to be used for reasoning, behaviour control, and speech.

In a glossy video explaining the work, Anthropic depicts the contents of Claude’s “global workspace” as sailing ships afloat on a vast sea of unconscious mental activity.

📊 Publisher Revenue Dinner Miami 2026

We are hosting a private dinner in Miami for senior revenue leaders across news, gaming, newsletter, specialist, and brand publishing. This dinner is for publishing professionals who are actively driving revenue strategy and want a candid, peer-level conversation on how to win the biggest commercial quarter of the year. If you are a Chief Revenue Officer, CEO, Programmatic Head, or Partnerships Director making decisions around yield, inventory, first-party data, and Q4 growth, this evening is designed for you.

Date: Wednesday, September 16, 2026
Time: 6:30 PM
Venue: Coral Room, Rusty Pelican Miami Restaurant, 3201 Rickenbacker Cwy, Key Biscayne, FL 33149, United States

What you will walk away with

• Practical yield, personalisation, and first-party data moves that are lifting revenue per visit right now

• A candid read on how your peers are pricing, packaging, and positioning inventory for the Q4 surge

• Insight into which new formats — video, newsletters, and creator partnerships — are actually paying in 2026

• An attendee-only summary of the evening's key insights and growth playbooks shared around the table

The dinner is high-trust, collaborative, and entirely off-the-record under Chatham House Rule. No panels, no pitches, no slides — just one focused evening on how to make every session, impression, and first-party signal work at full value in publishing's most important quarter.

Seats are strictly limited to 15 attendees.

A big thank you to Ezoic for co-hosting this evening with us.

Apply for your seat here ▸

🎯 LiveRamp × OpenAI: Measure Your ChatGPT Ad Performance

If you're running or planning ads on ChatGPT, you can now close the measurement gap. LiveRamp's Conversions API (CAPI) Hub connects directly to ChatGPT ad campaigns via secure server-to-server data connections, meaning you get reliable conversion tracking without depending on browser-based signals that often break or go missing.

In practice, this means you can:

• See which ChatGPT campaigns are actually driving conversions — not just clicks

• Optimize spend in real time based on accurate performance data

• Justify and grow your ChatGPT ad budget with measurement data you can trust

As consumer journeys shift toward AI-powered platforms, this gives marketers the infrastructure to keep up, connecting data, measuring impact, and proving ROI on one of the fastest-growing ad surfaces in the world.

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By Vahe Arabian

📊 AI Search Measurement Has Arrived, But Most Publishers Are Still Reading It Wrong

The measurement tools are finally catching up to AI search, but most publisher reporting isn't.

Look at what shipped in the last few months:

• Search Console launched Generative AI performance reports: dedicated views of your impressions in AI Overviews, AI Mode and Discover's AI features. Impressions only, no queries, no clicks, and still rolling out.

• Bing Webmaster Tools released its AI Performance report: where Copilot and Bing's AI summaries cite you, including the grounding queries machines run on your reader's behalf. Microsoft Clarity's Citations report is now generally available on top of that.

• GA4 now groups ChatGPT, Gemini, Claude and Perplexity visits under a new AI Assistant channel, so AI referrals finally show up as their own traffic source.

Real progress. But here's the next measurement mistake: treating each new report as another dashboard to glance at, instead of rebuilding the framework around them.

Because when you stress test the data, the story gets sharper:

1. Seer Interactive's tracking shows organic CTR on queries with AI Overviews bottomed at 1.3% in December 2025 and recovered to just 2.4% by February 2026. Better, but the click is not coming back as your primary KPI.

2. McKinsey found a brand's own site typically makes up only 5 to 10% of the sources AI search references. Measure only your domain, and you're blind to roughly 90% of your AI footprint.

3. GA4's AI Assistant channel is a floor, not a total. AI browsers and in-app answers strip referrer data, so real AI-influenced traffic runs higher than any report shows.

4. Microsoft Clarity's research found AI referrals converting at roughly 11x the rate of standard search, while still under 1% of visits. Volume metrics say ignore it. Revenue metrics say the opposite.

The job isn't picking a favourite dashboard; it's blending them into one scorecard:

• Visibility across every surface: organic, News, Top Stories, Discover AND the new gen AI reports

• AI citation share across Google, Copilot, ChatGPT and Perplexity, tracked monthly the way rankings used to be, with your journalists and brands as the entities measured, on your site and off it

• Owned audience growth: branded search, returning visitors, newsletter subscribers, direct traffic

• Revenue per visitor, not raw sessions, with AI referrals broken out so their conversion value is visible

• Performance by topic cluster and audience intent, not "traffic by article", so you see which editorial investments compound

Search is shifting from ranking pages to recommending trusted sources, and the platforms are finally handing us instruments to measure it. Publishers who wire them into one blended scorecard now will make sharper editorial and commercial calls than those still chasing yesterday's KPIs.

The future is liquid in the AI era, with some delightful exceptions | INMA

A Vogue editor told Marcel Semmler, Bauer Media’s global product chief, that a typical feature runs to roughly 20,000 words of reporting — interviews, notes, background — to produce a 4,000-word published article. What happens to the other 16,000 words? As AI is increasingly intermediating search results, it has already scraped those 4,000 words, summarised, and served back to readers who rarely clicked through. The remaining 16,000 words — the journalist’s raw materials, verification evidence, her domain knowledge, and judgment calls — are still standing.

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Local news went all in on the World Cup. Here’s what worked. | NiemanLab

The 2026 FIFA World Cup, hosted in North America this summer, has been fascinating to watch from different angles — from the matches themselves to community celebrations to the controversies. The tournament has brought hundreds of thousands of visitors to major cities in the United States, Canada, and Mexico. It’s been directing new and returning news consumers to local news outlets for vital information about how to make the most of the World Cup and the tournament’s impact on their lives. Over the last six months, local news publications have taken several different approaches to serving their audiences during the World Cup, from newsletters and library exhibits to videos and interactive maps.

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The next AI debate is unfolding within the news organization itself. | Editor & Publisher Magazine

For the past several years artificial intelligence (AI) has dominated headlines — both as the next transformative technology and as a threat to the environment, civic trust, jobs and democracy itself. The latter view is bolstered by a litany of high-profile failures. One of the more recent examples was the closure of Nota News, a site billed as a solution to news deserts that was found by Poynter and Axios to have plagiarized journalists’ work. At the same time, organizations such as Big Local News at Stanford and UC Berkeley have used AI-assisted methods to uncover 1.5 million previously inaccessible police records, leading to more than 100 investigations.

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Why Brand Positioning Is Now an AI Search Variable | Semrush

Most brands chasing AI visibility focus solely on content volume and technical fixes. Those matter. But they're not why AI recommends your competitor over you. Here’s what you need to keep in mind: AI search engines don't rank pages in the traditional sense. They build a model of your brand from the signals they find across the web. Then they decide whether to recommend you based on factors like how clearly and confidently they can describe what you do, who you do it for, and how relevant you are to the specific query. That makes consistent, relevant brand positioning one of the key variables in AI search visibility. And we’re not talking enough about it.

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Google Says No SEO Penalty For Year-Long A/B Tests? | SEJ

Google’s John Mueller recently answered a question about A/B testing web pages for long durations, warning that an unintended consequence is that enabling variations to be indexed can result in uncertainty as to which will be visible in the search results. A/B testing is when one or more versions of a web page is shown to users. The reason for doing this is generally for testing conversion rates and user responses. The important takeaway from the guidelines is that A/B testing live web pages is the guidelines were created to minimize impact on search performance.

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Microsoft steers Windows browser choice, study finds | PPC Land

A coalition calling itself the Browser Choice Alliance sent Microsoft a message on July 14, 2026, and it was not a friendly one. The statement praised independent researchers for confirming, once again, that Windows continues nudging people toward Edge even after they have chosen something else, and it reissued seven demands the alliance first made in a June letter that Microsoft has yet to answer publicly. The underlying research behind that statement, a follow-up study from Mozilla covering four countries and two versions of Windows, documented new evidence that the pattern now reaches into Copilot and the Windows Backup migration tool as well.

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